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Getting Older

Birthdays are a funny thing, aren’t they? Let’s look at this
tweet
for example,

It's @haacked's birthday. Give him crap about getting old.

No gifts, please. Especially not what Charlie suggests.

Of course I’m getting older. We’re all getting older. Every second of
every day and twice on Monday. Every femtosecond even. Perhaps the only
time we’re not getting older is the moment within a Planck
time interval.
But once that interval is up, yep, you’re older.

Yet people apparently live their lives completely oblivious to this fact
until they’re next birthday comes along. As the chronometer slides the
next number into place, the realization dawns, “Damn! I’m older!” What?
You didn’t know this?!

Feeling Older

The odd thing to me is that I don’t really feel older, mentally. I mean,
I consciously know I’m older, but I feel like there’s this smooth
continuum from my first memory to now. While the things I spend time
thinking about have changed, the way I think about others and about
myself feels like it hasn’t changed. I’m the same person then as I am
now, and that kind of blows my mind.

In my mind, old people tell you how they used to walk miles uphill both
ways to get to school. But I realize that these days, old people tell
you about how they used to have to use their phone to connect online at
1200 baud. And there was no internet!!! OMG! What the hell were we
connecting to?

Rather than feeling older, I am observing the evidence that I’m
older. For example, I used the word “baud” in this blog post. Another
example is how injuries now take much longer to heal. I have two kids, a
four year old and a two year old and I’m pretty sure that if I were to
slice them clean in half, that’d only put them out of commission for a
week. They’d heal up and have no scars! Meanwhile, if I get a paper
cut on a finger I can pretty much kiss that finger goodbye. Write it off
as a loss and start practicing typing with two bloody stumps for hands.

Getting Experienced

But it’s not just physical. I do notice that while I don’t feel older, I
do have the benefit of many more years of experience to draw upon. But
more importantly, I’m finally actually paying attention to that. Go
figure.

Last week, we had our GitHub summit and Friday was our field trip day to
a distillery then a bar. This was the night set aside to party hard.
Which is amazing to me because the night before I’m pretty sure we as a
company consumed enough alcohol to bring elephants to extinction.

But I drew upon my experience and took it easy because I had a flight
early the next morning and I did not want to be sick on an airplane.
Contrast this to a few years before at Tech-Ed Hong Kong when I was out
with some local friends and at 5:00 AM I had to leave the bar early to
catch a flight. For the first time in my life, I contemplated suicide.

Some might call that getting wiser. I call it pain avoidance.

Knowing Less

The other evidence of my getting older is that I know a lot less now
than I did when I was younger. Certainly that can’t be true in the
absolute sense since I don’t have alzheimer’s (that I’m aware of
anyways). But I remember as a young programmer I knew everything!

I knew the right way to do all things in all situations with absolute
conviction. But these days, I’m not so sure. About anything. All I have
is the breadth of my experience and pattern matching at my disposal.
Each new situation is simply a pattern matching exercise against my
database of experience followed by an experiment to see if what I
thought I knew produces good results.

The great thing about this approach is when you know everything, you
have nothing to learn. But now, I’m constantly learning. Many of my
experiments fail because many of my experiences are no longer relevant
today. The world changes. Quickly. But each experiment is an opportunity
to learn.

Staying Young

So yeah, I’m getting older, but I’ve found a loophole. Remember the kids
I mentioned slicing in half? I’m not going to do that because I’m
worried I’d end up with four of them then and two are already a handful.

These two do a great job of making me feel young because they will laugh
at every fart joke I can come up with.

So thanks for all the birthday wishes on Twitter, Facebook, and
elsewhere. Here’s to getting older!